Quotes About Gardening

Unlike T.V., we cannot have too much of science, despite its nuclear quirks. With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth ... but we, as gardeners, must beware, for some seeds are the seeds of ruin, and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous.

In the garden I tend to drop my thoughts here and there. To the flowers I whisper the secrets I keep and the hopes I breathe. I know they are there to eavesdrop for the angels.

And maybe that's the best we can do in this world, he thinks as he gets up to resume watering the flowers—tend to the garden and maintain the hope of a God. Against all evidence to the contrary.

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

Yup, gardening and laughing are two of the best things in life you can do to promote good health and a sense of well being.

To dig one's own spade into one's own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?

The space and light up there in Norfolk is wonderfully peaceful. I find myself doing funny things like gardening, and cooking, which I rarely do in London.

He looked down at her and caught a whiff of the honeysuckle fragrance of her hair. God, how he loved that smell. He'd planted fourteen honeysuckle bushes around his estate in Crestwood five years ago just to have a tiny piece of her there with him.

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.

Laurel had watched him prune. Holding the shears in both hands, he performed a sort of weighty sarabande, with a lop for this side, then a lop for the other side, as though he were bowing to his partner, and left the bush looking like a puzzle.

I am a particular fan of integrative exercise - that is, exercise that occurs in the course of doing some productive activity such as gardening, bicycling to work, doing home improvement projects and so on.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.

Gardening is not trivial. If you believe that it is, closely examine why you feel that way. You may discover that this attitude has been forced upon you by mass media and the crass culture it creates and maintains. The fact is, gardening is just the opposite - it is, or should be, a central, basic expression of human life.

You remind me, Geralt, of an old fisherman who, towards the end of his life, discovers that fish stink and the breeze from the sea makes your bones ache. Be consistent. Talking and regretting won't get you anywhere. If I were to find that the demand for poetry had come to an end, I'd hang up my lute and become a gardener. I'd grow roses.

A gardener's best tool is the knowledge from previous seasons. And it can be recorded in a $2 notebook.

Maybe you have to be a bit touched to be a ruler, good or bad. For, as the wise say, a sensible man looks after his garden and a coward looks after his money; a just man cares about his city and a crazy man cares about the government; and a wise man studies the thickness of fern-fronds.

Mr. Cross, who was digging up dandelions on the lawn with a spud, came up to the car and courteously helped them out, which really makes the getting out more difficult, for there are only two ways of getting out of an ordinary small car: the one, to slide your legs out first and somehow get your skirt and the rest of you to follow rather like coming down a fire escape, the other to get out with your back to the audience and not care what it looks like.

Gardeners instinctively know that flowers and plants are a continuum and that the wheel of garden history will always be coming full circle.

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

I do some of my best thinking while pulling weeds.

Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness.

Gardening is a working meditation for me. It helps me remember process, and it helps me remember patience.

First, kids should be involved in the production of their own food. They have to get their hands in the dirt, they have to grow things. They also have to become sensually stimulated, and the way to begin is with a bakery.